BLOCKBUSTER 767

Three winds of the key · one wooden city

A chunky plastic toy Boeing 767 sits on the launcher at one end of a kid's playroom table. Down the far end somebody has built a whole city out of painted wooden blocks — skyscraper stacks, office slabs, a water tower, an antenna mast, a bridge between two piers. You get three winds of the key to flatten as much of it as physics allows.

Everything that scores is physics. Nothing is scripted to fall.

How to play

1. Wind it up. The toy sits on the launcher. Steer left and right to trim the heading; steer up and down to trim how high the throw goes. The dial at the top of the screen shows where the throw is pointed. Hold Launch and the key turns: one notch, two, three, each one a harder throw and another second of boost. Past the third notch is a red zone — let go inside it and the spring throws harder than the toy can take, with boost to spare and an airframe that breaks twice as easily. Hold past THAT and the spring slips and you get nothing.
2. Call your shot. On the launcher, Boost and Dive step forward and back through the landmarks still standing — THE TOWER, THE SPAN, THE TANK. Bring the one you called down and it pays double.
3. Launch. Let go. The key unwinds and the toy is away.
4. Fly. Steer to bank and pitch. Boost for speed — you only have as much as the wind bought you — and Dive to spoil the lift and come down hard on something. The toy is a toy: hit anything hard enough and a wing snaps off, an engine pops, the tail goes — and it flies worse for the rest of the run.
5. Wreck. The round ends when the airframe stops moving, leaves the table, or 45 seconds pass. The tally lands, and the next plane goes on the launcher.
6. Three planes, one score. Then the end card, with a star rating and whatever the Kid has to say about it.

What the screen is telling you

On the launcher. Three key pips fill as you wind, and turn red together the moment you are into the red zone — that is your cue to let go. Beside the heading dial is a ladder showing how high the throw is aimed, and beside that a side-on picture of the throw: the table, the standing city drawn as a band with the towers on it, and the arc your plane will take, ending in a ring where it arrives. Wind harder and the arc reaches further. If the ring is short of the city, so is your throw. The three landmark chips along the top say what is still standing, and the one you have called is the gold one.

In the air. SPEED is how fast you are going, BOOST is how many seconds of thrust the wind bought you — when it hits 0.0 the throttle is dead for the rest of the run. The tape on the right is your altitude with the standing city's height marked across it: gold means you are inside the skyline, blue means you are sailing over it, red means you are about to plough the tabletop. The row of little plane parts is what the toy has left — a red cross is a part you lost.

Scoring

What	Worth
A block shoved off its home	10 per kilo of block
A tower brought down	500 × how tall it stood
A block that tumbles off the table edge	50
The landmark you called, brought down	double what it was worth

Topples inside three seconds of each other chain: every one in the chain adds half a multiplier, and the multiplier rides on everything you knock over while it lasts. The big scores come from one run that takes the whole middle lane down at once, not from three careful ones.

Stars: ★ at 20,000 · ★★ at 55,000 · ★★★ at 100,000.

Controls

Every action works on all three. Menus can be driven by any of them too.

Action	Mouse + keyboard	Controller	Touch
Steer / trim	WASD or arrows	Left stick	On-screen stick, left of the screen
Wind the key — hold for one, two, three notches	Hold Enter	Hold A / Cross	Hold Launch
Call your shot, on the launcher — step through the landmarks still standing	Shift forward, Space back	Right trigger forward, Left trigger back	Boost forward, Dive back
Boost	Shift	Right trigger	Boost
Dive	Space	Left trigger	Dive
Launch	Release Enter	Release A / Cross	Release Launch
Pause	Escape	Start	Menu
Move the menu cursor	Arrows / WASD	Left stick or d-pad	Tap the row
Confirm	Enter or Space	A / Cross	Tap the row
Back	Backspace or Escape	B / Circle	Tap Back
Start over	R	Y / Triangle	The pause card's row

The how-to-play card inside the game shows the same table, with the glyphs of whatever you happen to be holding.

Tips

• Trim low and boost the whole way. A flat, fast run down the middle lane goes through more towers than a high one that comes down on top of them.
• A tower hit at the base comes down as a tower and takes its neighbours with it. A tower clipped at the top loses four blocks and keeps standing.
• Losing a wing rolls the toy towards the hole. Ride it — a spiral through the back half of the city scores better than a straight line through nothing.
• The table edge pays. A block that goes over the side is worth more than one that just slides.